Fortress of Dragons Read online

  C. J.

  CHERRYH

  FORTRESS OF DRAGONS

  CONTENTS

  Map of Ylesuin

  The Zeide

  Lexicon

  Prologue

  There is magic.

  BOOK ONE

  Chapter 1

  A slow procession passed by…

  Chapter 2

  First it was the kitchens, down…

  Chapter 3

  The lords came to the summons…

  Chapter 4

  There seemed no courteous…

  Chapter 5

  Snow, and snow: that was…

  Chapter 6

  A gentle snow veiled the…

  Chapter 7

  There was no haste to deal…

  Chapter 8

  The evening was for a state…

  Chapter 9

  I advise you so that you may…

  Chapter 10

  The hills of Amefel north of…

  Chapter 11

  Pigs in a gate, Cefwyn said…

  Chapter 12

  Captain Anwyll was back in…

  BOOK TWO

  INTRELUDE

  The drifts were melting,…

  Chapter 1

  The weather turned back to…

  Chapter 2

  The storm wind came in the…

  Chapter 3

  Tarien slept fitfully, into the…

  Chapter 4

  Rain and thunder above…

  Chapter 5

  After the deluge of rain…

  Chapter 6

  Ninévrisë slept. That was…

  Chapter 7

  The army of Amefel moved…

  BOOK THREE

  INTERLUDE

  Morning came gray and…

  Chapter 1

  From the height of Danvy’s…

  Chapter 2

  Wind tore the morning’s…

  Chapter 3

  Ere’s that pesky bird!” Uwen…

  Chapter 4

  The hills that had been only…

  Chapter 5

  They marched, an army…

  Chapter 6

  One moment Tristen’s company…

  Chapter 7

  The clouds of the gray space…

  Chapter 8

  The battering of the doors…

  About the Author

  Acclaim

  Books by C. J. Cherryh

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Ylesuin

  The Zeide

  PROLOGUE

  A SUMMARY OF FORTRESS IN THE EYE OF TIME, FORTRESS OF EAGLES, AND FORTRESS OF OWLS.

  There is magic.

  There is wizardry.

  There is sorcery.

  They are not now, nor were then, the same.

  Nine hundred years in the past, in a tower, in a place called Galasien, a prince named Hasufin Heltain had an inordinate fear of death. That fear led him from honest study of wizardry to the darker practice of sorcery.

  His teacher in the craft, Mauryl Gestaurien, seeing his student about to outstrip his knowledge in a forbidden direction, brought allies from the fabled northland, allies whose magic was not taught, but innate. These were the five Sihhë-lords.

  In the storm of conflict that followed, not only Hasufin perished, but also ancient Galasien and all its works. Of all that city, only the tower in which Mauryl stood survived.

  Ynefel, for so later generations named the tower, became a haunted place, isolated within Marna Wood, its walls holding intact the horrified faces of lost Galasien’s people. The old tower was Mauryl’s point of power, and so he remained bound to it through passing centuries, al though he sometimes intervened outside the tower in the struggles that followed in the lands the Galasieni had ruled.

  The Sihhë took on themselves the task of ruling the southern lands…not the Galasieni, who had become bound to Ynefel, but other newcomers…notably the race of Men, who also had crept down from the north. The Sihhë swept across the land, subduing and building, conquering and changing all that the Galasieni had made, creating new authorities and powers to reward their subordinates and dealing harshly with their enemies.

  The five true Sihhë lived long, after the nature of their kind, and they left a thin presence of halfling descendants among Men before their passing. The kingdom of Men rapidly spread and populated the lands nearest Ynefel, with that halfling dynasty ruling from the Sihhë hall at unwalled Althalen.

  Unchallenged lord of Ynefel’s haunted tower, Mauryl continued in a life by now drawn thin and long, whether by wizardry or by nature: he had now outlasted even the long-lived Sihhë, and watched changes and ominous shifts of power as the blood and the innate Sihhë magic alike ran thinner and thinner in the line of halfling High Kings.

  For, of all the old powers, Shadows lingered, and haunted certain places in the land. One of these was Hasufin Heltain.

  One day, in the Sihhë capital, within the tributary kingdom of Amefel, and in the rule of the halfling Elfwyn Sihhë, a queen gave birth to a stillborn babe. The queen was inconsolable—but the babe miraculously drew breath and lived, warmed to life, as she thought, by Sihhë magic and a mother’s love.

  To the queen the child was a wonderful gift. But that second life was not the first life, and it was not the mother’s innate Sihhë magic, but a Shadow’s darkest sorcery that had brought breath into the child—for what lived in the babe was a soul neither Sihhë nor Man: it was Hasufin Heltain, in his second bid for life and power.

  So now Hasufin nestled in the heart of the Sihhë aristocracy, still a child, at a time when Mauryl, who might have realized what he was, had shut himself away in his tower at Ynefel, rarely venturing as far as Althalen—for Mauryl felt the weakness of the ages Hasufin had not lived.

  Other children of the royal house died mysteriously as that fey, ingratiating princeling grew stronger. Now alarmed, warned by his arts and full of fury and advice, Mauryl came to court to confront the danger he recognized. But the queen would not hear a wizard’s warning, far less dispose of a son of the house, her favorite, her dearest and most magical darling—a child who now, by the deaths of all elder princes, was near the throne.

  The day that child should attain his majority, and the hour that prince should rule, Mauryl warned them, the house and the dynasty would perish. But even that plain warning failed to persuade the queen; and the King, Elfwyn, took his grieving queen’s side, refusing Mauryl’s unthinkable command to destroy their own son.

  Foreseeing ruin, Mauryl turned not to the halfling Sihhë of the court, but to the Men who served them. He conspired with the warlord Selwyn Marhanen, the Sihhë trusted general, and thus encouraged Selwyn and other Men to bring down the halfling dynasty and take the throne for themselves. So Mauryl betrayed the descendants of the very lords he had raised up to prevent Hasufin’s sorcery, and for that reason Men called Mauryl both Kingmaker, and Kingsbane.

  Mauryl insinuated both the Marhanen and his men and a band of wizards into the royal palace. Mauryl and the majority of his circle held magic at bay while a younger wizard, Emuin, killed the sleeping prince in his chambers—a terrible and a bloody deed, and only the first act of bloodshed that night.

  Hasufin’s death was the limit of Mauryl’s interest in the matter. The fate of the Sihhë in the hands of Selwyn and his men, and even the fate of the wizards who had aided him, was all beyond his capability to govern, and Mauryl again retreated to his tower, weary and sick with age. Young Emuin took holy orders, seeking to forget his terrible deed and to find some salvation for himself as a Man and a cleric in an age of Men.

  In those years Selwyn’s own ambition and Men’s religious fear of a magic they did not wield led them to rise i
n earnest against Sihhë rule: province after province fell to the Marhanen, and their followers destroyed all that lay outside the approval of their priests…demolishing even the work of wizards who had aided their rise.

  But the district of Elwynor across the river from Althalen, though populated with Men, attempted to remain loyal to the Sihhë-lords and to maintain wizards in safety. They even raised an army to bring against the Marhanen, but dissent and claims and counterclaims of kingship within Elwynor precluded that army from ever taking the field. The Marhanen thus were able to seize the entire tributary kingdom of Amefel (in which the capital of Althalen had stood) and treat it as a province, right across the river from Elwynor.

  But Selwyn Marhanen—rather than rule from Althalen, remote from the heart of his power, and equally claimed by all the lords of Men—instead established a capital in the center of his home territory. He declared himself king, though not High King, and by his own cleverness and ruthlessness set his own allies under his heel. The lords of districts became barons of a new court at Guelemara, in Selwyn’s own district of Guelessar.

  From that new capital at Guelemara, Selwyn domi nated all the provinces southward. He as well as his subjects, mostly Guelenfolk and Ryssandish, being true Men with no gift for wizardry, had no love of it either—Selwyn because he feared wizards might challenge him, and his people because they saw magic and wizardry alike as a challenge to the gods…so priests of the Quinalt and Teranthine sects had taught them. For both reasons, Selwyn raised a great shrine next his palace, the Quinaltine, and favored the Quinalt Patriarch, who set a religious seal on all his acts of domination. But Selwyn trusted the Quinalt sect no more than he trusted wizards, and established none other than Emuin, now a Teranthine brother, as his advisor. This he did to balance the power of the Quinaltine.

  By now, of all Men loyal to the Sihhë, only the Elwynim had successfully held their border against the Guelenmen…for that border was on the one hand a broad river, the Lenúalim, and on the other, the haunted precincts of Marna Wood, near the old tower of Ynefel, and beyond the always restive district of Amefel.

  So, with that border established, the matter settled…save only the troublesome question of Amefel, the province on the Guelen-held side of the Lenúalim River, the population of which was not Guelenish, but close kin to the Elwynim. Selwyn’s hope of holding his lands firm against the Elwynim rested on not allowing an Elwynim presence on that side of the river…within a population virtually the same in accent, religion, and customs.

  Now the history of Amefel was this: Amefel had been an independent kingdom of Men when the first Sihhë-lords walked up to the walls of its capital of Hen Amas and demanded entry. The kings of Amefel, the Aswyddim, flung open their gates and helped the Sihhë in their mission to conquer Guelessar, a fact no Guelen and no Guelen king could quite forget. In return for this treachery, the local Aswydd house had always enjoyed a unique status under the Sihhë authority, and, alone of Men, styled themselves as kings, as opposed to High Kings, the title the Sihhë reserved for themselves and their successors.

  So now Selwyn had severed Amefel from Elwynor and claimed it…but at least for this approaching fall season, he foresaw that his own uneasily joined kingdom of Ylesuin, with barons at least two of whom had already tried to claim rule over the Guelens, would fall to internal quarrels the moment he looked elsewhere. If he became embroiled in a dispute with the Aswydds over their prerogatives, that would lead to his own barons scheming and plotting while he was distracted, and that situation might encourage Elwynor to break the unofficial truce…leading to war next spring from one end to the other of the lands of Men.

  So Selwyn Marhanen quietly accorded the Aswydds guarantees of many of their ancient rights, including their religion, and including their titles. By that agreement, while the Aswydds became vassals of the kings of Ylesuin, and were called dukes, they were also styled aethelings, that was to say, royal—but only within their own province of Amefel. This purposely left aside the question of whether the other earls of Amefel bore rank equivalent to the dukes of Guelen and Ryssandish lands.

  Selwyn thus had Amefel…or at least the consent of its aetheling…by the first winter of his rule, and he still had ambitions to go further. But the opposing district of Elwynor formed a region almost as large as Ylesuin was with Amefel attached, and, undeceived by the apparent truce, Elwynor’s lords used that winter to gather forces. By the next spring, with Selwyn in Amefel and Elwynor armed and strong enough to make invasion costly, both sides assessed their chances and declined battle. The river Lenúalim thus became the tacitly unquestioned but still unsettled border.

  The Elwynim, meanwhile, declared a Regency in place of the lost High King at Althalen. They chose one of their earls, himself with a glimmering of Sihhë blood, who styled himself Lord Regent, and waited, taking it on stubborn faith that not all the royal house of the Sihhë-lords had perished, that within their lifetimes a new Sihhë-lord, some surviving prince they called the King To Come, would emerge from hiding or come down from the fabled northern ice to overthrow the Marhanen and reestablish the Sihhë kingdom. This time the Sihhë kingdom would have faithful Elwynor at its heart, and all the loyal subjects, foremost the Elwynim, would live in peace and Sihhë-blessed prosperity in a new golden age of wizardry.

  The Elwynim, therefore, cherished magic, and prized the wizard-gift where it appeared. But outside the Lord Regent’s line there were far too few Elwynim who could practice wizardry in any appreciable degree. Certainly no one in the land possessed such magic as the Sihhë had used, and there were few enough wizards left who would even speak of the King To Come…for the wizards of this age had had firsthand experience of Hasufin Heltain, and they remained aloof from the various lords of the Elwynim who wished to employ them. Those few Elwynim who had any Sihhë blood whatsoever were likewise reticent, for fear of becoming the center of some rising against the Regency that could only end in disaster.

  So the Elwynim, deserted by their wizards and by those who did carry the blood, became too little wary of magic and those who promised it. They failed to ask the essential question: why the wizards remained silent and why Mauryl and Emuin both remained aloof from them, and thus they failed to know the danger that still existed in the shadows and among the Shadows.

  So the years passed into decades without a credible claimant to the throne in Elwynor, and without the rise of another great wizard.

  Selwyn died. Ylesuin’s rule passed to Selwyn’s son Ináreddrin, who was a middle-aged man with two previous marriages and two grown sons.

  Now Ináreddrin was Guelen to the core, which meant devoutly, blindly Quinalt. That was his mother’s influence. As a young prince, he had had no love of his uncivil warlord father, but had a great deal of fear of him. And under this dual influence of his mother’s faith and his father’s disinterest, Ináreddrin grew up with no tolerance for other faiths, despite the exigencies of the Amefin treaty…and with a superstitious fear of wizardry, based on his observation of his father Selwyn’s terrors in his declining years. Ináreddrin fell more and more under the influence of the Quinaltine, and exercised little patience with his wild eldest son, Cefwyn—for Cefwyn took his grandfather’s example and clung to the Teranthine tutor, Emuin (that same Emuin who had aided Mauryl at Althalen), whom Selwyn had appointed royal tutor for both his grandsons.

  This was no accident, first because of wizardry, where little was accidental at all; and secondly because Selwyn saw superstition rising in his son and wished to stop it in the next generation. If Selwyn as a reigning king had found priests and the Quinalt a convenient resource, and to that end had supported them, he never forgot what he had faced at Althalen. Selwyn knew he had lost his son to the priests’ influence, but he wanted his grandsons never to dread priests or wizards—rather to understand them, and to keep the best on their side.

  This matter of the royal tutor was a source of bitter argument within the royal house: the queen died, Ináreddrin grew more and mor
e alienated from his father, and the very year Selwyn died and Ináreddrin became king, Ináreddrin persuaded his younger son Efanor into the strictest Quinalt faith—lavishing on him all the affection he now angrily denied the elder son.

  So did the highest barons—notably the dukes of the provinces of Ryssand and Murandys—lavish attention on the younger prince, Efanor. There was even talk of overturning the succession—for the more religious and proper Efanor became, the more Cefwyn, the crown prince and heir, consoled himself with wild escapades, sorties on the border, and women…very many women.

  Still, by Guelen law and custom, even by the tenets of the Quinalt itself, Cefwyn was, incontrovertibly, the heir, and it was no light matter to set Cefwyn aside: in that, even the most conservative of priests hesitated.

  So Ináreddrin, either in hopes that administrative responsibility would temper Cefwyn—or, it was whispered, in hopes some assassin or border skirmish would settle the matter and make Efanor his heir—sent Cefwyn to administer the Amefin garrison. To do that, Ináreddrin bestowed on Prince Cefwyn the courtesy title of viceroy, thus keeping a firmer Marhanen hand on that curiously independent province and insinuating a closer Marhanen presence into a very troublesome district.

  Now, since ordinarily and by the treaty, there was no such thing as a viceroy in Amefel, the duke of Amefel, Heryn Aswydd, was not at all pleased by this gesture, but Heryn dared not protest and give the Marhanen an excuse to send a larger garrison. So Duke Heryn kept his discontent to himself, even agreeing to report to Ináreddrin regarding the prince’s behavior, and on the worsening situation across the river.